BioAs a teenager, Lauren Edman was too shy to practice her singing exercises at home, but she grew up to be a woman with the moxie to perform on Apollo Amateur Night where contestants are routinely booed offstage. Lauren’s seductively spare solo debut It’s Always the Quiet One is a prismatic and intimate self-portrait. It’s a starkly vulnerable album that peeks under the veneer of shyness and examines the inner struggles of someone courageously and coyly grappling with the societal and personal manifestations of being soft-spoken.

Lauren is best known for her singing and songwriting on the track “Afterthoughts” from Sleepthief’s 2006 electronic album The Dawnseeker. At the time, she was a relatively unknown talent with a passion for trip-hop featuring ethereal but strong female vocalists. The Connecticut native moved to New York City around that time with the plan of making an album of her own music, but in the years that followed she struggled to find a balance between producing the music that played in her head and paying the rent. “I wrote a lot of these songs at around 3AM while working night jobs and living in a tiny, dingy bedroom in Queens,” she says. She later joined shoegaze band For Every Story Untold, with whom she currently gigs and records. The dual aesthetic trajectories of these disparate influences—the angelic electronic atmospherics of trip-hop and the earthiness of the shoegaze aesthetic inform It’s Always the Quiet One. The album begins with a minimalistic electronic direction that morphs to an organic and rustic sensibility in its second half.